Dr Tajamul reviews Dr. Aaliya Baba’s debut poetry, “Ode to Silence,” exclusively for Different Truths, highlighting its nuanced literary craft in exploring silences, womanhood, and universal human experiences.
“When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness,” remarks Pinter in one of his famous speeches. This “nearer nakedness” implies a state shorn of all the identities that define an individual, leaving only the utter nakedness of being. Dr Aaliya Baba’s poetry explores similar silences, echoing through a range of over 50 regular free verse poems and 13 micro poems in her debut collection.
This silence resonates universally, reflecting human experiences of pain, loss, suffering, resilience and the bare routineness of existence, alongside a desire for peace and divine intervention. At times, it becomes, echoing the struggles of women striving for their own space, a theme powerfully personified through the womb-kitchen metaphor. This metaphor reflects the enduring struggles of women across diverse spaces, for whom escaping the confines of the kitchen can feel as difficult as ripping out the very womb to which they are often biologically reduced.
The very first poem of this collection “A Room of my Own” strikes you immediately with the identity of the poet, adapting Virginia Woolf’s iconic call for independence, to her own circumstances where the daily frustration is conveyed through “spilt milk on the floor”. It’s a moment that feels both relatable and revealing:
I dwell in the womb of this kitchen
My womb is a kitchen too.
I am a woman
And this a room of my own!
This poem serves as a harbinger of the collection’s depth, showcasing a poet well-versed not only in the discourse of women’s writing but also in the broader literary canon. Throughout the collection, numerous poems resonate with themes and tones reminiscent of well-known works, demonstrating the author’s self-awareness and familiarity with established literary traditions, themes, and discourses. Consequently, the collection demands serious consideration. The poet’s experience in teaching English literature in Kashmir is evident, as she skilfully integrates her knowledge into the work, underscoring a mastery of literary craft.
The poem “Equality” offers a compelling challenge to abstract discussions of equality. It dismisses vague or commonplace notions, urging a focus on the physical reality of womanhood. The lines, “My dear don’t speak to me of equality tonight/ Let’s try a lesson on anatomy,” highlight the poem’s argument that the female body, in its concrete form, must be at the core of any serious exploration of equality. In this way, the body becomes a powerful metaphor for speech, a means of breaking the “historical silence” imposed on women. This along with the poem “Anonymous “immediately calls to mind Helen Cixous’s influential essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” where women are exhorted to embrace their physicality and write with their bodies, reclaiming a voice that cannot be easily ignored. The following verses are telling in this regard:
Bearing a child then, is a bond with death.
She is the last to wake up
to see what she had nurtured in her womb
In blood, sweat and excruciating labour
They cut her open to get the heir out of her…
The poem “English Teacher” begins rather dramatically and boldly challenges the silencing of women’s voices in academia. It critiques how societal expectations reduce a dedicated educator to domestic roles, ignoring her intellectual contributions:
Blaring voices mock my name
Should I scream louder to be heard?
Or tap the ground beneath my feet
to tell them that these beats are different
from pots and pans colliding in the kitchen.
Beyond Personal to Universal
Though the collection opens with a powerful focus on the experiences of women and their struggles, Ode to Silence avoids a one-dimensional critique of patriarchy. Instead, the recurring motifs of a father’s warmth, affection, and protection create a nuanced and balanced perspective, acknowledging the complexities within familial and societal structures:
In exile when you must have long forgotten your history
a little girl from your childhood in her father's arms
will come to haunt you. (Exile)
In yet another poem called “Your Doll”, the father-figure reappears whose embrace is “vaster than the skies” and the desire to cling to him is eternal. The poem starkly portrays the fragility of love and vulnerability, evident in the poignant lines, “I liked bright colours, but you draped me in brown.” The poet vividly remembers each heartbreak caused by the father’s stern glances. Over time, the relationship evolves, reflecting on the delicate balance between love’s constraints and the pursuit of freedom.
Absolute freedom embodies a sense of fear: of getting lost forever, and never making it back to the surface of life, hence the importance of clinging to the cuff to the end of time. In this way the poem transcends beyond the themes of parental love and control to the broader questions of how love, vulnerability, freedom and control are inextricably linked. There is always a desire to cling to the surface and crave for the human connection. This duality of freedom and restraint, speech and silence, joy and sorrow, is explored throughout the collection. Sometimes it takes a dramatic turn, and comes straight out of Kafka and Becket’s outlook, absurd, strange, unresolvable, and hopeless aporias. Poem “Routine” could be reproduced here as an example of this kind:
Routine died!
All the people in the world assembled for its
funeral (anxious on what they must do next),
they stayed longer, Ever liberated crowd, confused
Some revolutionaries came forward to explain
A metaphysical protest on the death of routine...
Is a desperate cry for God to show up!
Alas!
Routine came alive out of the coffin!
And all alarm bells rang!
People dispersed, rushing in different directions!
And the only chance, hence lost!
The human condition often involves waiting for a divine intervention to liberate us from the monotony of existence, a deliverance that may well remain perpetually out of reach. This sense of futility is captured in Estragon’s famous line from “Waiting for Godot”: “what do we do now, now that we are happy?” Like Vladimir and Estragon, we find ourselves lost and directionless, even when presented with the possibility of something new. However, she does not portray a hopeless world, her “Non-Poem” is an answer to the human capacity to find hope and meaning even in destruction, the comparison with the stars is sheer brilliance of this phenomenon:
How would a star not break
into a myth: granting wishes?
There is certain honour, I
suppose, we attach to objects
consumed and broken apart by
the fire within.
A fragmentation beyond repair.
The parts scatter into alien zones, light years apart, yet
you make it a glue to build what might be broken in your world:
A hope, analogous to wishing
when sighting a broken star!
Mapping The Collection
The overarching theme of silence, as suggested by the title, invites readers to ponder the power of unspoken words and the spaces between them. This silence can be both a source of pain and a catalyst for introspection, as seen in poems that grapple with loss and longing. The full scope of poems could be gauged from the fact that they are simpler to read for everyone, and yet powerful enough to convey deepest thoughts that resonate with a readership aware of various discourses. While overarching presence of silence forms the core of the collection, with poems intersecting and informing one another, they could still be thematically mapped into certain categories including self and identity, relationships and love, loss and grief, homeland, silence and language, nature and existence, and social commentary. Each theme offers a unique lens through which to explore the poet’s inner world and the broader human experience. For instance, poems like “A Room of My Own” and “Infinite Soul” delve into the complexities of self-discovery, while “Meet Me in Winter” and “Eternal Love” explore the depths of human connection. Some poems deal with art of creation itself, for example, “Catharsis”, “Annihilation”, “Starve Me no More”, “Melody”, and “Shrine and Words” while some poems speak about human resilience in the face of adversity and hopelessness.
On the Literary Craft and Vivid Imagery
Dr Baba employs a language that is both lucid and profoundly sweet, achieving a delicate balance between emotional expression and restraint. There is neither sentimentality nor a desire to preach. Writing between the confinement of poetry and the expansion of prose, she has found a language for her silence and deepest musings. Her refusal to be defined is forewarned as she keeps on evolving as a person and is “an ongoing war”. The poet is constantly in exile, a space between speech and silence, neither belonging completely to the realm of speech nor silence. Like the ‘outhouse’ she describes in “Bride”—a liminal space neither fully inside nor outside—
Her creativity thrives in this in-betweenness, a space of exile where feelings are transformed into potent symbols and metaphors. Her ability to evoke potent images is unmistakable, testifying to the mastery of language and her craftsmanship. I reproduce here some remarkable lines without interruption to relish the charm with which she has created a symphony between thought and expression:
I am a bundle of deep/ memories that stick to my/ soul like magnet. (Journey)
My silence scratching/ its nails/ on the walls of my soul. (Prosaic Life)
My former home is a pack of familiar shadows, / which grab my empty heart / anytime I giggle or laughnow (Bride)
I nurse fire, / In the quietness of my being...
I too have a soul: / Crushed into silence (Shriek)
Grave is a welcome place for a body / that has lost relevance to life (Grave)
Pain is the master shooter, / It can’t see other than the spot, / that we shield, / In day and dreams! (Winter)
The wonder of life is not /death But life itself (Grave)
One elephant’s paw /Lifts from a poet’s heart/ With a metaphor/ Extracted right. (Catharsis)
Here is a poet who invites you to read rather than hunt for the dictionary. She relies purely on the power of her thought rather than hide behind the obscurity of language. It is too early to judge her work for deficiencies. I hope her upcoming works spill metaphors on the larger silence engulfing Kashmir in her way. English poetry in Kashmir still searches for an heir to the acumen of Agha Shahid Ali. While Kashmiri poetry continues to flourish, its English poetry needs recognition and a space to breathe. A new generation has found refuge in poetry, interestingly, dominated by women across languages, Nighat Sahiba, Rumuz, Ather Zia, Uzma Falak, Nighat Nasreen, Dr Aaliya Baba and many more whose works are yet to be anthologized. This space needs to be keenly observed, provided there is a free environment where these voices could prosper.
Cover image sourced by the reviewer
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